Eadweard Muybridge (/ˌɛdwərdˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904, born Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first name Eadweard as the original Anglo-Saxon form of Edward, and the surname Muybridge, believing it to be similarly archaic.[1]

At age 20, he emigrated to America as a bookseller, first to New York, and then to San Francisco. Planning a return trip to Europe in 1860, he suffered serious head injuries in a stagecoach crash in Texas.[2] He spent the next few years recuperating in England, where he took up professional photography, learning the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions.[2] He went back to San Francisco in 1867. In 1868 he exhibited large photographs of Yosemite Valley, which made him world-famous.

In 1874 Muybridge shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, but was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide.[3] In 1875 he travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition.

During his later years, Muybridge gave many public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, returning frequently to England and Europe to publicise his work. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. He returned to his native England permanently in 1894. In 1904, the Kingston Museum, containing a collection of his equipment, was opened in his hometown.

Edward James Muggeridge was born and raised in England. Muggeridge changed his name several times, starting with "Muggridge". In 1855, in the United States, he used the surname "Muygridge".[5]

After he returned from Britain to the United States in 1867, he used the surname "Muybridge". In addition, he used the pseudonymHelios (Titan of the sun) to sign many of his photographs. He also used this as the name of his studio and gave it to his only son, Florado, as a middle name: Florado Helios Muybridge, born in 1874.[6]

While travelling in 1875 on a photography expedition in the Spanish-speaking nations of Central America, the photographer advertised his works under the name "Eduardo Santiago Muybridge" in Guatemala.[7] After an 1882 trip to England, he changed the spelling of his first name to "Eadweard", the Old English form of his name. The spelling was probably derived from the spelling of King Edward's Christian name as shown on the plinth of the Kingston coronation stone, which had been re-erected in 1850 in his town, 100 yards from Muybridge's childhood family home. He used "Eadweard Muybridge" for the rest of his career,[5][8] but his gravestone carries his name as "Eadweard Maybridge".[9]

Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames,[10] in the county of Surrey in England, on 9 April 1830 to John and Susanna Muggeridge; he had three brothers. His father was a grain and coal merchant, with business spaces on the ground floor of their house adjacent to the River Thames at No. 30 High Street. The family lived in the rooms above.[11] After his father died in 1843, his mother carried on the business. His cousin Norman Selfe, who also grew up in Kingston upon Thames, moved to Australia and, following a family tradition, became a renowned engineer.[12] His great grandparents were Robert Muggeridge and Hannah Charman, who owned a farm. Their oldest son John Muggeridge (1756–1819) was Edward's grandfather; he was a stationer who taught Edward the business. Several uncles and cousins, including Henry Muggeridge (Sheriff of London), were corn merchants in the City of London. All were born in Banstead, Surrey. Edward's younger brother George, born in 1833, lived with their uncle Samuel in 1851, after the death of their father in 1843.

Muybridge emigrated to the United States at the age of 20, arriving in New York City. Five years later, he moved to San Francisco in 1855, a few years after California became a state, and while the city was still the "capital of the Gold Rush".[13] He started a career as a publisher's agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company, and as a bookseller. At the time, the city was booming, with 40 bookstores, nearly 60 hotels, and a dozen photography studios.[14] Later in his life, he wrote about also having spent time in New Orleans during his early years in the United States.[15]

By 1860, Muybridge was a successful bookseller. He left his bookshop in care of his brother, and prepared to sail to England to buy more antiquarian books. However, Muybridge missed the boat and instead left San Francisco in July 1860 to travel by stagecoach over the southern route to St. Louis, by rail to New York City, then by ship to England.[2][16]

In central Texas, Muybridge suffered severe head injuries in a violent runaway stagecoach crash which injured every passenger on board, and killed one of them.[17][18] Muybridge was bodily ejected from the vehicle, and hit his head on a rock or other hard object. He was taken 150 miles (240 km) to Fort Smith, Arkansas, for treatment (his earliest memories post-accident were there). He was kept there for three months, trying to recover from symptoms of double vision, confused thinking, impaired sense of taste and smell, and other problems. He went to New York City, where he continued in treatment for nearly a year before being able to sail to England.

While recuperating in England and receiving treatment from Sir William Gull, Muybridge took up the new field of professional photography sometime between 1861 and 1866.[19] Muybridge later said that he had changed his vocation at the suggestion of his physician.[2] He learned the wet-plate collodion process in England, and may have been influenced by some of the great English photographers of those years, such as Julia Margaret Cameron.[20][21][22] Also during this period, Muybridge secured at least two British patents for his inventions, including an improvement of print-making techniques and an apparatus for washing clothing and other textile articles.[2]

Muybridge had left San Francisco in 1860 as a merchant, but returned in 1867 as a professional photographer, with highly proficient technical skills and an artist's eye. He became successful in photography, focusing principally on landscape and architectural subjects. He converted a lightweight carriage into a portable darkroom to carry out his work.[20] His business cards also advertised his services for portraiture.[23] His stereographs, the popular format of the time, were sold by various galleries and photographic entrepreneurs (most notably the firm of Bradley & Rulofson) on Montgomery Street, San Francisco. Early in his new career, Muybridge was hired by Robert B. Woodward (1824–1879) to take extensive photos of his Woodward's Gardens, a combination amusement park, zoo, museum, and aquarium that opened in San Francisco in 1866.[24]

Muybridge established his reputation in 1867, with photos of the Yosemite Valley wilderness (some of which were taken of the same scenes shot by his contemporary Carleton Watkins) and areas around San Francisco. Muybridge gained notice for his landscape photographs, which showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West; if human figures were portrayed, they were dwarfed by their surroundings, as in Chinese landscape paintings. He signed and published his work under the pseudonym Helios, which he also used as the name of his studio.[25]

Albumen silver print photograph of Muybridge in 1867 at base of the Ulysses S. Grant tree "71 Feet in Circumference" in the Mariposa Grove, Yosemite, by Carleton Watkins

Muybridge took enormous physical risks to make his photographs, using a heavy view camera and stacks of glass plate negatives. A spectacular stereograph he published in 1872 shows him sitting casually on a projecting rock over the Yosemite Valley, with 2,000 feet (610 m) of empty space yawning below him.[2]

In 1868, Muybridge was commissioned by the US government to travel to the newly acquired US territory of Alaska to photograph the Tlingit Native Americans, occasional Russian inhabitants, and dramatic landscapes.[26]:242 In 1871, the Lighthouse Board hired Muybridge to photograph lighthouses of the American West Coast. From March to July, he traveled aboard the Lighthouse Tender Shubrick to document these structures.[27] In 1873, Muybridge was commissioned by the US Army to photograph the Modoc War being conducted a Native American tribe in northern California and Oregon. Many of his stereoscopic photos were published widely, and can still be found today.[26]:46

As Muybridge's reputation grew in the late 1800s, former California Governor Leland Stanford contacted the photographer to help settle a bet about how horses move at a trot. In 1878, Muybridge made a notable 13-part 360° photographic panorama of San Francisco, to be presented to the wife of Leland Stanford. Today, it can be viewed on the Internet as a seamlessly-spliced panorama, or as a QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) panorama.[29]

The Horse in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge: The horse Sallie Gardner, owned by Leland Stanford, running at a 1:40 pace over the Palo Alto track, 19 June 1878. Frames 1–11 used for animation; frame 12 not used.

In 1872, the former governor of California, Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, hired Muybridge for some photographic studies. He had taken a position on a popularly debated question of the day – whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while trotting. The same question had arisen about the actions of horses during a gallop. In 1872, Muybridge began experimenting with an array of 12 cameras photographing a galloping horse in a sequence of shots. His initial efforts seemed to prove that Stanford was right, but he didn’t have the process perfected.

The human eye could not break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop. Up until this time, most artists painted horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground; and at a full gallop with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear, and all feet off the ground.[30] Stanford sided with the assertion of "unsupported transit" in the trot and gallop, and decided to have it proven scientifically. Stanford sought Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.[31]

Galloping horse, animated using photos by Eadweard Muybridge

Between 1878 and 1884, Muybridge perfected his method of photographing horses in motion, proving that they do have all four hooves off the ground during their running stride. In 1872, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing his Standardbred trotting horse named Occident, also fully airborne at the trot. This negative was lost, but the image survives through woodcuts made at the time (the technology for printed reproductions of photographs was still being developed). Muybridge later made additional studies, as well as improving his camera for quicker shutter speed and faster film emulsions. By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiments, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse at a trot;[32] lantern slides have survived of this later work.[33]Scientific American was among the publications at the time that carried reports of Muybridge's ground-breaking images.[33]The Daily Alta California reported that Muybridge first exhibited the photographs at the San Francisco Art Association on 8 July 1878.[34]

Stanford also wanted a study of the horse at a gallop. Muybridge planned to take a series of photographs on 15 June 1878, at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm (now the campus of Stanford University). He placed numerous large glass-plate cameras in a line along the edge of the track; the shutter of each was triggered by a thread as the horse passed (in later studies he used a clockwork device to set off the shutters and capture the images).[35] The path was lined with cloth sheets to reflect as much light as possible. He copied the images in the form of silhouettes onto a disc to be viewed in a machine he had invented, which he called a "zoopraxiscope". This device was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process as an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography.

The study is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion; it shows images of the horse with all feet off the ground. This did not take place when the horse's legs were extended to the front and back, as imagined by contemporary illustrators, but when its legs were collected beneath its body as it switched from "pulling" with the front legs to "pushing" with the back legs.[31]

In 1872, Muybridge married 21-year-old Flora Shallcross Stone. In 1874, Muybridge discovered that a drama critic known as Major Harry Larkyns might have fathered Flora's seven-month-old son Florado.[31][36]

On 17 October, Muybridge went to Calistoga to track down Larkyns. Upon finding him, Muybridge said, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here's the answer to the letter you sent my wife", and shot him point-blank. Larkyns died that night, and Muybridge was arrested without protest and put in the Napa jail.[37]

Muybridge was tried for murder, and pleaded insanity due to a severe head injury suffered in the 1860 stagecoach accident. At least four long-time acquaintances testified under oath that the accident had dramatically changed Muybridge's personality, from genial and pleasant to unstable and erratic.[2] During the trial, Muybridge undercut his own insanity case by indicating that his actions were deliberate and premeditated, but he also showed impassive indifference and uncontrolled explosions of emotion.[2] The jury dismissed the insanity plea, but acquitted the photographer on the grounds of "justifiable homicide", disregarding the judge's instructions. The episode interrupted his photography studies, but not his relationship with Stanford, who had arranged for his criminal defense.[2]

Today, the court case and transcripts are important to historians and forensicneurologists, because of the sworn testimony from multiple witnesses regarding Muybridge's state of mind and past behaviour.[2] The American composer Philip Glass composed an opera, The Photographer, with a libretto based in part on court transcripts from the case.

Shortly after his acquittal in February 1875, Muybridge left the United States on a previously planned 9-month photography trip to Central America, as a "working exile".[31] By 1877, he had resumed work for Stanford.

Flora petitioned for divorce, but was initially unsuccessful. Her second petition received a favourable ruling, and an order for alimony was entered in April 1875.[38] Flora died in July 1875 while Muybridge was in Central America.[2][38] She had placed their son, Florado Helios Muybridge (later nicknamed "Floddie" by friends), with a French couple. In 1876, Muybridge had the boy moved from a Catholic orphanage to a Protestant one and paid for his care.[38] Otherwise he had little to do with him.

Photographs of Florado Muybridge as an adult show him to have strongly resembled Muybridge. Put to work on a ranch as a boy, he worked all his life as a ranch hand and gardener. In 1944, Florado was hit by a car in Sacramento and killed, at approximately the age of 70.[7]

Muybridge often travelled back to England and Europe to publicise his work. The opening of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, and the development of steamships made travel much faster and less arduous than it was in 1860. On 13 March 1882 he lectured at the Royal Institution in London in front of a sell-out audience, which included members of the Royal Family, notably the future King Edward VII.[39] He displayed his photographs on screen and showed moving pictures projected by his zoopraxiscope.[39]

Muybridge and Stanford had a major falling-out concerning his research on equine locomotion. Stanford had asked his friend and horseman Dr. J. B. D. Stillman to write a book analysing The Horse in Motion, which was published in 1882.[33] Stillman used Muybridge's photos as the basis for his 100 illustrations, and the photographer's research for the analysis, but he gave Muybridge no prominent credit. The historian Phillip Prodger later suggested that Stanford considered Muybridge as just one of his employees, and not deserving of special recognition.[40]

However, as a result of Muybridge not being credited in the book, the Royal Society of Arts withdrew an offer to fund his stop-motion studies in photography, and refused to publish a paper he had submitted, accusing him of plagiarism.[2] Muybridge filed a lawsuit against Stanford to gain credit, but it was dismissed out of court.[31] Stillman's book did not sell as expected. Muybridge, looking elsewhere for funding, was more successful.[2] The Royal Society later invited Muybridge back to show his work.[31]

In the 1880s, the University of Pennsylvania sponsored Muybridge's research using banks of cameras to photograph people in a studio, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo to study their movement. The human models, either entirely nude or very lightly clothed, were photographed against a measured grid background in a variety of action sequences, including walking up or down stairs, hammering on an anvil, carrying buckets of water, or throwing water over one another. Muybridge produced sequences showing farm, industrial, construction, and household work, military maneuvers, and everyday activities. He also photographed athletic activities such as baseball, cricket, boxing, wrestling, discus throwing, and a ballet dancer performing. Showing a single-minded dedication to scientific accuracy and artistic composition, Muybridge himself posed nude for some of the photographic sequences, such as one showing him swinging a miner's pick.[2][31]

Classic animation by Muybridge of a horse and rider jumping

Between 1883 and 1886, Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. During 1884, the painter Thomas Eakins briefly worked alongside him, to learn more about the application of photography to the study of human and animal motion. Eakins later favored the use of multiple exposures superimposed on a single photographic negative to study motion more precisely, while Muybridge continued to use multiple cameras to produce separate images which could also be projected by his zoopraxiscope.[41] The vast majority of Muybridge's work at this time was done in a special sunlit outdoor studio, due to the bulky cameras and slow photographic emulsion speeds then available. Toward the end of this period, Muybridge spent much of his time selecting and editing his photos in preparation for publication.

In 1887, the photos were published as a massive portfolio, with 781 plates comprising 20,000 of the photographs, in a groundbreaking collection titled Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements.[42] Muybridge's work contributed substantially to developments in the science of biomechanics and the mechanics of athletics. Some of his books are still published today, and are used as references by artists, animators, and students of animal and human movement.[43]

In 1888, the University of Pennsylvania donated an album of Muybridge's photographs, which featured students and Philadelphia Zoo animals, to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Hamid II, who had a keen interest in photography. This gift may have helped to secure permissions for the excavations that scholars from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology later pursued in the Ottoman region of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), notably at the site of Nippur.[44] The Ottoman sultan reciprocated, five years later, by sending as a gift to the United States a collection of photograph albums featuring Ottoman scenes: the Library of Congress now preserves these albums as the Abdul Hamid II Collection.[45]

Recent scholarship has noted that in his later work, Muybridge was influenced by, and in turn influenced the French photographer Étienne-Jules Marey. In 1881, Muybridge first visited Marey's studio in France and viewed stop-motion studies before returning to the US to further his own work in the same area.[46] Marey was a pioneer in producing multiple-exposure, sequential images using a rotary shutter in his so-called "Marey wheel" camera.

While Marey's scientific achievements in the realms of cardiology and aerodynamics (as well as pioneering work in photography and chronophotography) are indisputable, Muybridge's efforts were to some degree more artistic rather than scientific. As Muybridge explained, in some of his published sequences he had substituted images where original exposures had failed, in order to illustrate a representative movement (rather than producing a strictly scientific recording of a particular sequence).[47]

Today, similar setups of carefully timed multiple cameras are used in modern special effects photography, but they have the opposite goal of capturing changing camera angles, with little or no movement of the subject. This is often dubbed "bullet time" photography.

After his work at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge travelled widely and gave numerous lectures and demonstrations of his still photography and primitive motion picture sequences. At the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Muybridge presented a series of lectures on the "Science of Animal Locomotion" in the Zoopraxographical Hall, built specially for that purpose in the "Midway Plaisance" arm of the exposition. He used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures to a paying public. The Hall was the first commercial movie theater.[48]

Eadweard Muybridge returned to his native England in 1894 and continued to lecture extensively throughout Great Britain. He returned to the US once more, in 1896–1897, to settle financial affairs and to dispose of property related to his work at the University of Pennsylvania. He retained control of his negatives, which he used to publish two popular books of his work, Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901), both of which remain in print over a century later.[49]

Muybridge died on 8 May 1904 in Kingston upon Thames of prostate cancer at the home of his cousin Catherine Smith.[50] His body was cremated, and its ashes interred in a grave at Woking in Surrey. On the grave's headstone his name is misspelled as Eadweard Maybridge".[9][31]

In 2004, a British Film Institute commemorative plaque was installed on the outside wall of the former Smith house, at Park View, 2 Liverpool Road.[51] Many of his papers and collected artifacts were donated to the Kingston Library, and eventually passed to the Kingston Museum in his place of birth.

According to an exhibition at Tate Britain, "His influence has forever changed our understanding and interpretation of the world, and can be found in many diverse fields, from Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase and countless works by Francis Bacon, to the blockbuster film The Matrix and Philip Glass's opera The Photographer."[52]

Sol LeWitt – Contemporary American artist was inspired by Muybridge's serial investigations. LeWitt explicitly pays homage to the photographer in Muybridge I and II (1964).

Diller Scofidio + Renfro – EJM 1:Man Walking at Ordinary Speed and EJM2:Interia (1998). The two-part multimedia dance work with Charleroi/Danses and the Ballet Opera of Lyon was inspired by motion photography experiments of two photographer–scientists: Eadward Muybridge and Etiene-Jules Marey[53]

Étienne-Jules Marey – in 1882 recorded the first series of live action photos with a single camera by a method of chronophotography; influenced and was influenced by Muybridge's work

Thomas Eakins – American artist who worked with and continued Muybridge's motion studies, and incorporated the findings into his own artwork

In 1991, the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, hosted a major exhibition of Muybridge's work, plus the works of many other artists who had been influenced by him. The show later traveled to other venues and a book-length exhibition catalogue was also published.[59] The Addison Gallery has significant holdings of Muybridge's photographic work.[60]

An exhibition of important items bequeathed by Muybridge to his birthplace of Kingston upon Thames, entitled Muybridge Revolutions, opened at the Kingston Museum on 18 September 2010 (exactly a century since the first Muybridge exhibition at the Museum) and ran until 12 February 2011.[64] The full collection is held by the Museum and Archives.[65]

Many of Muybridge's photographic sequences have been published since the 1950s as artists' reference books. Cartoon animators often use his photos as a reference when drawing their characters in motion.[43][68][69]

In the 1964 television series hosted by Ronald Reagan, Death Valley Days, Hedley Mattingly was cast as Muybridge in the episode "The $25,000 Wager". In the story line, Muybridge invents the zoopraxiscope for his patron, former Governor Leland Stanford (Harry Holcombe), a race-horse owner. Muybridge's assignment is to determine by the use of multiple cameras whether all four hooves of a horse are briefly off the ground while trotting. Diane Brewster was cast as Muybridge's wife, the former Flora Stone, who was twenty-one years his junior.[70]

Jim Morrison makes a reference to Muybridge in his poetry book The Lords (1969), suggesting that "Muybridge derived his animal subjects from the Philadelphia Zoological Garden, male performers from the University".[71]

Since 1991, the company Optical Toys has published Muybridge sequences in the form of movie flipbooks.

The video for Scottish singer Jimmy Somerville's song, "Coming," featured in the 1992 film Orlando, features dozens of Muybridge's motion study photographs.

In 1993, the music video for U2's "Lemon", directed by Mark Neale, was filmed in black and white with a grid-like background as a tribute to Eadweard Muybridge.

The play Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge (2006) was a co-production between Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre and the University of British Columbia Theatre. While blending fiction with fact, it conveys Muybridge's obsession with cataloguing animal motion. The production started touring in 2010. In 2015, it would be adapted into a feature film.

A 17-minute documentary about Muybridge, directed by Juho Gartz, was made in 2007, and was awarded "Best Documentary" in the Helsinki film Festival "Kettupäivät" the following year.[72]

To accompany the 2010 Tate exhibition, the BBC commissioned a TV programme, "The Weird World of Eadweard Muybridge", as part of Imagine, the arts series presented by Alan Yentob.[73]

A short animated film titled "Muybridge's Strings" by Kōji Yamamura was released in 2011.[74]

On 9 April 2012, the 182nd anniversary of his birth, a Google Doodle honoured Muybridge with an animation based on the photographs of the horse in motion.[75]

Writer Josh Epstein and director Kyle Rideout made the feature film Eadweard (2015), starring Michael Eklund and Sara Canning. The film tells the story of Eadweard Muybridge's motion experiments, social reactions to the morality of photographing nude figures in motion, his work with sanitarium patients, and his (fictional) death in a duel.[76]

Muybridge appears as a character in Brian Catling's 2012 novel, The Vorrh, where events from his life are blended into the fantasy narrative.

Czech theatre company Laterna Magika introduced an original play based on Muybridge's life in 2014.[77] The play follows his life and combines dancing and speech with multimedia created from Muybridge's works.

Five frames of the horse Annie G were encoded in bacteria's DNA using Crispr in 2017, 90% of which proved recoverable.[78]

^"If anything, the surname Muggeridge actually derives from a place in Devon, Mogridge, in turn taking its name from one Mogga who held a ridge there. Edward, on the other hand, was indeed spelled Eadweard in Old English." Adrian Room, Naming Names: Stories of Pseudonyms and Name Changes, with a Who's Who, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 125.

^"Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain, 8 September 2010 – 16 January 2011". Tate.org.uk. Retrieved 9 April 2012. "This exhibition brings together the full range of his art for the first time, and explores the ways in which Muybridge created and honed his remarkable images, which continue to resonate with artists today. Highlights include a seventeen foot panorama of San Francisco and recreations of the zoopraxiscope in action."

^"Kingston Museum – Muybridge Revolutions". Muybridgeinkingston.com. Archived from the original on 9 July 2010. Retrieved 9 April 2012. "This important collection includes Muybridge's original Zoöpraxiscope machine and 68 of only 71 glass Zoöpraxiscope discs known to exist worldwide. In addition, the archive holds many personalised lantern slides, hundreds of collotype prints, rare early albums, Muybridge's own scrapbook in which he charts his entire career, a copy of his epic San Franscisco Panorama; and many other items that make the Kingston Muybridge bequest a collection of major international significance."

1.
Kingston upon Thames
–
Kingston upon Thames, also known as Kingston, is the principal settlement of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames in southwest London. It was the ancient market town where Saxon kings were crowned, Kingston is situated 10 miles southwest of Charing Cross and is one of the major metropolitan centres identified in the London Plan. Kingston lies approximately 33 feet above sea level, Kingston was part of a large ancient parish in the county of Surrey and the town was an ancient borough, reformed in 1835. It has been the location of Surrey County Hall from 1893, most of the town centre is part of the KT1 postcode area, but some areas north of Kingston railway station have the postcode KT2 instead. The population of the town itself, comprising the four wards of Canbury, Grove, Norbiton, Kingston was called Cyninges tun in 838, Chingestune in 1086, Kingeston in 1164, Kyngeston super Tamisiam in 1321 and Kingestowne upon Thames in 1589. The name means the manor or estate from the Old English words cyning. It belonged to the king in Saxon times and was the earliest royal borough and it was first mentioned in 838 as the site of a meeting between King Egbert of Wessex and Ceolnoth, Archbishop of Canterbury. Kingston lay on the boundary between the ancient kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, until in the tenth century when King Athelstan united both to create the kingdom of England. Probably because of the symbolic location, several tenth-century kings were crowned in Kingston, Æthelstan in 925, Eadred in 946. Other kings who may have been crowned there are Edward the Elder in 902, Edmund in 939, Eadwig in 956, Edgar in about 960 and Edward the Martyr in 975. It was initially used as a block, but in 1850 it was moved to a more dignified place in the market before finally being moved to its current location in the grounds of the guildhall. Well known aviation personalities Sydney Camm, Harry Hawker and Tommy Sopwith were responsible for much of Kingstons achievements in aviation. British Aerospace finally closed its Lower Ham Road factory in 1992, part of the site was redeveloped for housing but the riverside part houses a community centre. The growth and development of Kingston Polytechnic and its transformation into Kingston University has made Kingston a university town, Kingston upon Thames formed an ancient parish in the Kingston hundred of Surrey. The parish of Kingston upon Thames covered an area including Hook, Kew, New Malden, Petersham, Richmond, Surbiton, Thames Ditton. The town of Kingston was granted a charter by King John in 1200, but the oldest one to survive is from 1208, other charters were issued by later kings, including Edward IVs charter that gave the town the status of a borough in 1481. The borough covered a smaller area than the ancient parish, although as new parishes were split off the borough. The borough was reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, becoming the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames and it had been known as a Royal borough through custom and the right to the title was confirmed by George V in 1927

2.
Surrey
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Surrey is a county in the south east of England. It shares borders with Kent to the east, East Sussex to the south-east, West Sussex to the south, Hampshire to the west and south-west, Surrey County Council sits extraterritorially at Kingston upon Thames, administered as part of Greater London since 1965. With a resident population of 1.1 million, Surrey is the most densely populated and third most populated county in the South East region, after Kent, the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, Wandsworth, and parts of Lewisham and Bromley were in Surrey until 1889. The boroughs of Croydon, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Sutton and Richmond upon Thames south of the River Thames were part of Surrey until 1965, when they too were absorbed into Greater London. In the same year, the county was extended north of the Thames by the addition of Spelthorne, due to this expansion, modern Surrey also borders on the London boroughs of Hounslow and Hillingdon. It has the highest GDP per capita of any English county, Surrey is divided in two by the chalk ridge of the North Downs, running east-west. To the north of the Downs the land is mostly flat, the geology of this area is dominated by London Clay in the east, Bagshot Sands in the west and alluvial deposits along the rivers. Much of Surrey is in the Metropolitan Green Belt and it contains a good deal of mature woodland. Among its many notable beauty spots are Box Hill, Leith Hill, Frensham Ponds, Newlands Corner and Puttenham & Crooksbury Commons. Surrey is the most wooded county in England, with 22. 4% coverage compared to an average of 11. 8%. Box Hill has the oldest untouched area of woodland in the UK. Surrey also contains Englands principal concentration of lowland heath, on soils in the west of the county. Agriculture not being intensive, there are many commons and access lands, together with a network of footpaths and bridleways including the North Downs Way. Accordingly, Surrey provides much in the way of leisure activities. The highest elevation in Surrey is Leith Hill near Dorking and it is either 293,294 or 295 metres above sea level and is the second highest point in southeastern England after Walbury Hill 297 metres in West Berkshire. Surrey has a population of approximately 1.1 million people and its largest town is Guildford, with a population of 66,773, Woking comes a close second with 62,796. They are followed by Ewell with 39,994 people and Camberley with 30,155, towns of between 25,000 and 30,000 inhabitants are Ashford, Epsom, Farnham, Staines and Redhill. Guildford is the county town, although the county administration was moved to Newington in 1791

3.
Woking
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Woking is a town that shares its name with the surrounding local government district, located in the northwest of Surrey, England. It is at the edge of the Greater London Urban Area and is a part of the London commuter belt, with frequent trains. Woking is 23 miles southwest of Charing Cross in central London, Woking town itself, excluding the surrounding district, has a population of 62,796, with the whole local government district having a population of 99,500. Woking has been a Conservative area since the constituency was created in 1950, though Wokings earliest written appearance is in the Domesday Book, it is mentioned as the site of a monastery in an 8th-century context, as Wochingas. As a result, the original settlement 1 mile to the south-east, on the River Wey, later, Woking Crematorium at St Johns became the first crematorium in the United Kingdom. This site was then the home of the engineering firm James Walker & Company for many years, known as The Lion Works, this area was finally redeveloped in the 1990s into todays Lion Retail Park. This was a £40 million project to take hundreds of Woking homes away from the plain of the Hoe Stream. It has also provided new community facilities and roads, Woking Borough Council had been planning this scheme, which was approved in September 2010, for over 20 years. It was being run in conjunction with the Environment Agency, the Council has received finance from, the Public Works Loan Board, a number of grants, including £3.7 million from the Environment Agency, proceeds from the sale of new homes and of other assets. The Council expects the scheme to be funded by 2014 with no ongoing costs incurred by the Council. The scheme was completed on schedule in 2012, the constituency of Woking has historically been a Conservative safe seat, with the Liberal Democrats being the principal opposition in the last five general elections. Its current Member of Parliament is Jonathan Lord, elections to the borough council take place in three out of every four years, with one-third elected in each election. The election in 2011 gave the Conservatives an overall majority of seats for the first time in 20 years, the current Mayor of the borough is councillor Derek McCrum. In 2010 the council elected councillor Mohammed Iqbal as the first Asian Mayor of Woking and these are linked via an innovative private electricity distribution system operating completely off the public power grid. In order to do this, the government laid new power lines to all locations on the Woking sustainable community energy system. Should the public power grid fail, central Woking would continue to have an energy supply, the cost for providing this is approximately UK£0. 01/kWh less than for public electricity. It has been reported that the borough saves UK£974,000 a year in energy costs if the costs are ignored. By March 2004 the initiatives had also cut the boroughs carbon emissions by 17. 24%, Albion Square canopy was built in 2007, following local council approval three years earlier

4.
Photography
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Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. With an electronic sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel. A negative image on film is used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print. The word photography was created from the Greek roots φωτός, genitive of φῶς, light and γραφή representation by means of lines or drawing, several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. Johann von Maedler, a Berlin astronomer, is credited in a 1932 German history of photography as having used it in an article published on 25 February 1839 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung. Both of these claims are now widely reported but apparently neither has ever been confirmed as beyond reasonable doubt. Credit has traditionally given to Sir John Herschel both for coining the word and for introducing it to the public. Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, later Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid also independently described a pinhole camera in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Daniele Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1566, wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals in 1694. The fiction book Giphantie, published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, the discovery of the camera obscura that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural camera obscura that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley, a hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. So the birth of photography was primarily concerned with inventing means to capture, renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art. The camera obscura literally means dark chamber in Latin and it is a box with a hole in it which allows light to go through and create an image onto the piece of paper. Around the year 1800, British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture the image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance and he used paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate. The shadow images eventually darkened all over, the first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful again in 1825, in 1826 or 1827, he made the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature. Because Niépces camera photographs required a long exposure, he sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with one that was more practical. With an eye to eventual commercial exploitation, the partners opted for total secrecy, Daguerres efforts culminated in what would later be named the daguerreotype process

5.
Leland Stanford
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Amasa Leland Stanford was an American tycoon, industrialist, politician, and the founder of Stanford University. Migrating to California from New York at the time of the Gold Rush, he became a merchant and wholesaler. He served one term as governor of California after his election in 1861. As president of Southern Pacific Railroad and, beginning in 1861, Central Pacific, he had power in the region. He is widely considered a robber baron, Stanford was born in 1824 in what was then Watervliet, New York. He was one of eight children of Josiah and Elizabeth Phillips Stanford, among his siblings were New York State Senator Charles Stanford and Australian businessman and spiritualist Thomas Welton Stanford. His immigrant ancestor, Thomas Stanford, settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, later ancestors settled in the eastern Mohawk Valley of central New York about 1720. Stanfords father was a farmer of some means, Stanford was raised on family farms in the Lisha Kill and Roessleville areas of Watervliet. The family home in Roessleville was called Elm Grove, the Elm Grove home was razed in the 1940s. Stanford attended the schools until 1836 and was tutored at home until 1839. He attended Clinton Liberal Institute, in Clinton, New York, in 1845, he entered the law office of Wheaton, Doolittle and Hadley in Albany. After being admitted to the bar in 1848, Stanford migrated with other settlers, moving to Port Washington, Wisconsin. His father presented him with a law library said to be the finest north of Milwaukee, in 1850, Stanford was nominated by the Whig Party as Washington County, Wisconsin district attorney. On September 30,1850, Stanford married Jane Elizabeth Lathrop in Albany and she was the daughter of Dyer Lathrop, a merchant of that city, and Jane Anne Lathrop. The couple did not have any children for years, until their only child, in 1852, having lost his law library and other property to a fire, Stanford followed his five brothers to California during the California Gold Rush. His wife, Jane, returned temporarily to Albany and her family and he served as a justice of the peace and helped organize the Sacramento Library Association, which later became the Sacramento Public Library. In 1855, he returned to Albany to join his wife, in 1856, he and Jane moved to Sacramento, where he engaged in mercantile pursuits on a large scale. His other three associates were Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington and they hired Theodore Dehone Judah as the chief engineer

6.
Movie projector
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A movie projector is an opto-mechanical device for displaying motion picture film by projecting it onto a screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination, the first movie projector was the Zoopraxiscope, invented by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion, the stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892–94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, a more sophisticated movie projector was invented by Frenchman Louis Le Prince while working in Leeds. In 1888 Le Prince took out a patent for a 16-lens device that combined a motion picture camera with a projector, in 1888, he used an updated version of his camera to film the first ever motion picture, the Roundhay Garden Scene. The pictures were exhibited in Hunslet. The Lumière brothers invented the first successful movie projector and they made their first film, Sortie de lusine Lumière de Lyon, in 1894, which was publicly screened at LEden, La Ciotat a year later. The first commercial, public screening of cinematographic films happened in Paris on 28 December 1895, the cinematograph was also exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. At the Exhibition, films made by the Lumière Brothers were projected onto a screen measuring 16 by 21 meters. In 1999, digital projectors were being tried out in some movie theatres. These early projectors played the movie stored on a server and played back through the projector, due to their relatively low resolution, the images at the time showed pixelization blocks in some scenes, much like images on early widescreen televisions. By 2006, the advent of much higher 4K resolution digital projection had removed any traces of pixelization, the systems became more compact than the larger machines of four years earlier. By 2009, movie theatres started replacing the film projectors with digital projectors, in 2013, it was estimated that 92% of movie theatres in the United States had converted to digital, with 8% still playing film. In 2015, numerous popular filmmakers—including Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan—lobbied large studios to commit to purchase an amount of 35 mm film from Kodak. The decision ensured that Kodaks 35mm film production would continue for several years, nowadays film projectors are considered obsolete as high-resolution digital projectors offer many advantages over traditional film units. For example, digital projectors contain no moving parts except fans, can be operated remotely and they also allow for much easier, less expensive, and more reliable storage and distribution of content, including the ability to display live broadcasts. According to the theory of the phi phenomenon, the brain constitutes an experience of apparent movement when presented with a sequence of near-identical still images. Persistence of vision should be compared with the phenomena of beta movement

7.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci

8.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange

9.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush

10.
Europe
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Europe is a continent that comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, yet the non-oceanic borders of Europe—a concept dating back to classical antiquity—are arbitrary. Europe covers about 10,180,000 square kilometres, or 2% of the Earths surface, politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states of which the Russian Federation is the largest and most populous, spanning 39% of the continent and comprising 15% of its population. Europe had a population of about 740 million as of 2015. Further from the sea, seasonal differences are more noticeable than close to the coast, Europe, in particular ancient Greece, was the birthplace of Western civilization. The fall of the Western Roman Empire, during the period, marked the end of ancient history. Renaissance humanism, exploration, art, and science led to the modern era, from the Age of Discovery onwards, Europe played a predominant role in global affairs. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers controlled at times the Americas, most of Africa, Oceania. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, gave rise to economic, cultural, and social change in Western Europe. During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the east, until the revolutions of 1989 and fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1955, the Council of Europe was formed following a speech by Sir Winston Churchill and it includes all states except for Belarus, Kazakhstan and Vatican City. Further European integration by some states led to the formation of the European Union, the EU originated in Western Europe but has been expanding eastward since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The European Anthem is Ode to Joy and states celebrate peace, in classical Greek mythology, Europa is the name of either a Phoenician princess or of a queen of Crete. The name contains the elements εὐρύς, wide, broad and ὤψ eye, broad has been an epithet of Earth herself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion and the poetry devoted to it. For the second part also the divine attributes of grey-eyed Athena or ox-eyed Hera. The same naming motive according to cartographic convention appears in Greek Ανατολή, Martin Litchfield West stated that phonologically, the match between Europas name and any form of the Semitic word is very poor. Next to these there is also a Proto-Indo-European root *h1regʷos, meaning darkness. Most major world languages use words derived from Eurṓpē or Europa to refer to the continent, in some Turkic languages the originally Persian name Frangistan is used casually in referring to much of Europe, besides official names such as Avrupa or Evropa

11.
Texas
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Texas is the second largest state in the United States by both area and population. Other major cities include Austin, the second most populous state capital in the U. S. Texas is nicknamed the Lone Star State to signify its former status as an independent republic, and as a reminder of the states struggle for independence from Mexico. The Lone Star can be found on the Texan state flag, the origin of Texass name is from the word Tejas, which means friends in the Caddo language. Due to its size and geologic features such as the Balcones Fault, although Texas is popularly associated with the U. S. southwestern deserts, less than 10 percent of Texas land area is desert. Most of the centers are located in areas of former prairies, grasslands, forests. Traveling from east to west, one can observe terrain that ranges from coastal swamps and piney woods, to rolling plains and rugged hills, the term six flags over Texas refers to several nations that have ruled over the territory. Spain was the first European country to claim the area of Texas, Mexico controlled the territory until 1836 when Texas won its independence, becoming an independent Republic. In 1845, Texas joined the United States as the 28th state, the states annexation set off a chain of events that caused the Mexican–American War in 1846. A slave state before the American Civil War, Texas declared its secession from the U. S. in early 1861, after the Civil War and the restoration of its representation in the federal government, Texas entered a long period of economic stagnation. One Texan industry that thrived after the Civil War was cattle, due to its long history as a center of the industry, Texas is associated with the image of the cowboy. The states economic fortunes changed in the early 20th century, when oil discoveries initiated a boom in the state. With strong investments in universities, Texas developed a diversified economy, as of 2010 it shares the top of the list of the most Fortune 500 companies with California at 57. With a growing base of industry, the leads in many industries, including agriculture, petrochemicals, energy, computers and electronics, aerospace. Texas has led the nation in export revenue since 2002 and has the second-highest gross state product. The name Texas, based on the Caddo word tejas meaning friends or allies, was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves, during Spanish colonial rule, the area was officially known as the Nuevo Reino de Filipinas, La Provincia de Texas. Texas is the second largest U. S. state, behind Alaska, though 10 percent larger than France and almost twice as large as Germany or Japan, it ranks only 27th worldwide amongst country subdivisions by size. If it were an independent country, Texas would be the 40th largest behind Chile, Texas is in the south central part of the United States of America. Three of its borders are defined by rivers, the Rio Grande forms a natural border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south

12.
Collodion process
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The collodion process is an early photographic process. Collodion is normally used in its wet form, but can also be used in humid or dry form, the latter made the dry form unsuitable for the usual portraiture work of most professional photographers of the 19th century. The use of the dry form was mostly confined to landscape photography. The collodion process is said to have invented in 1851, almost simultaneously, by Frederick Scott Archer. During the subsequent decades, many photographers and experimenters refined or varied the process, by the end of the 1850s it had almost entirely replaced the first practical photographic process, the daguerreotype. During the 1880s the collodion process, was replaced by gelatin dry plates—glass plates with a photographic emulsion of silver halides suspended in gelatin. The dry gelatin emulsion was not only convenient, but it could also be made much more sensitive. The wet plate collodion process has undergone a revival as a historical technique over the past few decades, there are several practising ambrotypists and tintypists who regularly set up and make images at Civil War re-enactments. Fine art photographers use the process and its handcrafted individuality for gallery showings, there are several makers of reproduction equipment. The process is taught in workshops around the world and several workbooks, many artists work with collodion around the globe, including traveling photographer Craig Murphy, Kurt Grüng, Sally Mann, and Ben Cauchi. The collodion process produced an image on a transparent support. The collodion process, thus combined desirable qualities of the calotype process, collodion printing was typically done on albumen paper. The collodion process had other advantages, especially in comparison with the daguerreotype and it was a relatively inexpensive process. The polishing equipment and fuming equipment needed for the daguerreotype could be dispensed with entirely, the support for the images was glass, which was far less expensive than silver-plated copper, and was more durable than paper negatives. It was also fast for the time, requiring only seconds for exposure, the wet collodion process had a major disadvantage. The entire process, from coating to developing, had to be done before the plate dried and this gave the photographer no more than 10 minutes to complete everything. This made it inconvenient for use, as it required a portable darkroom. The plate dripped silver nitrate solution, causing stains and troublesome build-ups in the camera, the silver nitrate bath was also a source of problems

This deteriorated dry plate portrait of Theodore Roosevelt is similar to a wet plate image but has substantial differences.

A portable photography studio in 19th century Ireland. The wet collodion process sometimes gave rise to portable darkrooms, as photographic images needed to be developed while the plate was still wet.

"A Veteran with his Wife", taken by an anonymous photographer, shows a British veteran of the Napoleonic era Peninsular Wars. It is a hand-tinted ambrotype using the set collodion positive process, made circa 1860.

A pair of brimstone butterflies in flight. The female, above, is in fast forward flight with a small angle of attack; the male, below, is twisting his wings sharply upward to gain lift and fly up towards the female.